Story: From the immediate aftermath of the American/Canadian-made 1996 TV movie starring Paul McGann through the announcement in 2003 of the show’s imminent return under the creative guidance of Russell T. Davies, including a lengthy period of time during which no one at the BBC seemed to know the scope of what rights had been assigned, or for how long, in order to get the 1996 movie made, this book tracks the bizarrely meandering path from one Doctor Who comeback to another, more enduring one.
Review: The “wilderness years” of Doctor Who are a peculiar thing to track – because which “wilderness years” are we talking about? The seven years from the concluding chapters of the original BBC series in 1989 through the one-off 1996 revival movie, or the period from 1996 to 2003? This book covers the latter, which, in hindsight, is truly an underexamined epoch in Doctor Who history. There’s already an excellent book about how Big Finish Productions came to be, more or less, the de facto makers of Doctor Who in 1999 (and in fact, we’ve already reviewed it here). But what was going on at the BBC? That’s what Paul Hayes covers here.
And it’s to Hayes’ credit that he does it very thoroughly, explaining the labyrinthine org chart of the BBC itself for readers who aren’t privy to that sort of thing. Unenviably, Hayes’ history coincides with a stretch of time during which that org chart was in a state of near-constant flux, realigning itself to function within the broadcast industry of the 1990s and then the 21st century. One character who serves as a constant in Hayes’ story is, naturally, Welsh TV writer Russell T. Davies, who – as it turns out – was having at least semi-formal meetings with various people up and down the BBC org chart about reviving Doctor Who as early as 1998. By then, Davies had gained considerable clout in the British broadcast industry as the creator of Queer As Folk, and even the people whose talks with him dead-ended for one reason or another all admit that the prospect of Davies at the helm of the TARDIS was exciting even before the turn of the millennium.
Hayes interviews as many people who had contact with either Davies or with Doctor Who as a valuable BBC IP as he possibly can. Davies declined to be interviewed, as did a few other players in the story, both major and minor, leaving Hayes to draw from his copious interviews and columns with Doctor Who Magazine and with assorted trade publications. The sheer number of interviews conducted does a great deal to help stitch together the trajectories of those who would prove to play a major part in Doctor Who’s comeback story: Davies, BBC 1 controller Lorraine Heggessy, BBC Head of Drama Jane Tranter, and BBC Wales Head of Drama Julie Gardner. That some of these people – especially Davies – declined to be interviewed leaves Hayes in an unenviable position with trying to nail down the dates and circumstances of key meetings between some of those involved. He’s left trying to “triangulate” these events from incomplete or conflicting accounts, something which may prove frustrating to those hoping to nail down exact dates of certain events, or even who said what to whom.
There’s an entire chapter devoted to a comedy of errors wherein nearly everyone at the BBC – up to and including Heggessy – is under the impression that the BBC no longer controls Doctor Who as an IP. Hayes digs into what the source(s) of these mistaken impressions probably were: the rights to the Daleks resting with the estate of Terry Nation, a game of telephone being played with the notion that the BBC had signed Doctor Who over to Universal Studios (producers of the 1996 TV movie) in its entirety, and a mish-mash of mistaken impressions about various parties who held, or claimed to hold, movie rights that would have forestalled a new television series. It’s comical, but also frustrating, as the stock explanation “the rights to Doctor Who are terribly complicated” becomes the default answer that keeps anyone from advancing the project toward its comeback for the better part of a decade. Hayes also singles out a plucky researcher for the BBC’s own web site as being the one who finally discovered that, unless elements owned by other creators such as the Daleks were involved, there was actually nothing preventing Doctor Who from being made again by the BBC.
Big Finish is acknowledged in The Long Game, but this book concerns itself primarily with what the BBC was doing – or not doing – with Doctor Who between 1996 and 2003. This takes in such strange, sequestered-in-alternate-timelines tales as Dan Freeman’s 2001 online audio drama Death Comes To Time and Freeman’s subsequent attempts to pitch himself as the man who could bring Doctor Who back to TV, 2003’s more decisive attempt to create a ninth Doctor with The Scream Of The Shalka, and numerous aborted pitches from other parties to revive the show, including some names quite well known in the realm of semi-professional-to-professional fandom. This also takes in the story of the BBC’s sudden reclamation of the print fiction license from Virgin Publishing (resulting in the end of the New Adventures novels), and frequent check-ins behind the scenes of Doctor Who Magazine, which was in the odd position of being a professional print periodical devoted to a television series that hadn’t been consistently produced since the 1980s.
But the pulse of fandom is also taken as every bit of seemingly promising news and every major rumor appears and then fades into the rear-view mirror, and particularly fascinating is a chapter titled “What do we want?” which polls a number of voices from inside fandom (including some industry professionals) and beyond about what was felt to be the most absolutely vital stew of elements to bring back in a Doctor Who revival. It’s surprising how many of them felt is necessary to jettison as much of the existing continuity of Doctor Who as possible, considering that, as I write this review, we’ve just been treated to a nearly-90-minute special which brought back past companions from Ian to Jo to Melanie to Tegan and Ace for a story which also encompassed the Master, cameo appearances by past Doctors, UNIT, Daleks, and Cybermen. As much unnecessary baggage as some of those interviewed thought Doctor Who’s decades of existing canon represented, was any of it ever in any serious danger of being left behind when industry pros who were weaned on the early years of Doctor Who were the ones trying to bring it back?
And of course, toward the end of the book, it’s noted that the 60th anniversary episodes are once again being produced by Davies, Gardner, and Tranter, now through an independent studio called Bad Wolf Productions – a name inspired by the overarching plotline of Davies’ first season as Doctor Who’s showrunner. The one question the book doesn’t ask is: with this comeback so rapturously received by fandom and the general audience at large, might Doctor Who be setting itself up for a problem continuing its existence without these three major players who brought it back to our screens in 2005? It remains to be seen if the audience will allow Davies to take his leave of the TARDIS a second time, and that’s a huge concern if we’re hoping to avoid a third stretch of wilderness years. But that is, arguably, a topic for another book – and one that I’d fully approve of Paul Hayes writing, considering how smartly he handled this book’s complex interconnected strands of parallel events, personalities, and almost-Byzantine organizations.
Don’t let the legally-required “unauthorized history” subtitle give you an excuse to sleep on this book – any criticisms of the BBC that arise do so through the various players’ own comments, rather than through editorializing on the author’s part. It’s a part of Doctor Who history that any BBC-vetted volume is likely to gloss over out of embarrassment.
Year: November 1, 2021
Author: Paul Hayes
Publisher: Ten Acre Films
Pages: 365